Buffalo’s Bison Plumbing

I came across this old ad for Buffalo Plumbing Discount while digging around in a basement crawl space in my other life. There were several old newspapers, Buffalo Evening News and Courier Express from the 1960s and 70s.

Most were in pretty rough shape, but they were still better to work around then the pile of broken windows on the other side of the crawlspace. The few Metro pages that didn’t disintegrate had some cool old ads in them. Most were pretty much what you’d expect; Sattlers, Kleinhans, Sears. One smalll ad that caught my eye was for Buffalo Plumbing Discount Center.

When I saw it, I thought it was actually for a different plumbing place we’ve passed over on Fillmore on our way to B&L. For some reason, that place had stuck with me, so when I saw the ad I took a few pictures of it. It wasn’t until later I double-checked the addresses and it looks like they’re different bison plumbing companies. There seems to be (or at least have been) a lot of “Bison Plumbing” companies.

Apparently naming every business in Buffalo with some variation of Buffalo, Bison, Queen City or Nickel City in the name wasn’t limited to the city’s renaissance and was just as prevalent back in the day when Broadway and Fillmore were lined with successful businesses.

The Bison Plumbing City on Fillmore is now a boarded up building, and Bison Discount Plumbing Center on Broadway is just an empty lot. It isn’t the only empty lot along Broadway or throughout the city’s East Side and the Broadway-Fillmore District. Those empty lots, sadly, represent the sum total of redevelopment that the city had invested in for those areas while Canalside and the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus swell and absorb millions of dollars.

The newspaper wasn’t in the best shape, but that was cool, it gave the logo a distressed look. The problem was keeping that distressed, worn look without there being a lot of white scratchiness in the letters when I added a background color. There are probably actual ways of fixing that, but I don’t know what they are; I layered a couple copies each of the logo and background color of varying opacity, merged them, and then tweaked the lighting. It’s worked for the past when I’ve wanted to layer in a texture or old paper look, like on my Whistle Pig logo, and it did the trick here, too.